Posts Tagged ‘Cormac McCarthy’
What do you think? Here’s how the writer begins: Sure, alphabetically, Absalom, Absalom! is first on this list. But, coincidentally, it is also the greatest Southern novel ever written. A crowing achievement of William Faulkner’s experimentation in narratives and storytelling, it encapsulates all that defines the post-war (that’s the Civil War, you guys) Southern mentality, […]
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“Rat-eyed” Virginia Woolf described Somerset Maugham as. “No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word,” said Eudora Welty of William Faulkner. “Curiously dull, furiously commonplace, and often meaningless,” Alfred Kazin said of William Faulkner. “Hemingway never climbed out on a limb and never used a word where the reader […]
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Or perhaps you have. Yet the following list, laid out in no particular order (with the exception of the last one, at the bottom of this list), is relatively obscure: Nothing is as it seems under the sharp western sun. After recovering from an enigmatic and near-fatal illness, Gasteneau, a man with an iron will, […]
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In a lecture he delivered at Cornell University, Vladimir Nabokov said this: “A work of art shouldn’t make you think, it should make you shiver.” And yet in reply to that one must ask: what about those of us who actually like for a book to make us think? What about those of us who […]
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Here Are My Top Thirteen Best First Sentences in Literature: 13. It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not. (Paul Auster, City of Glass) 12. A few miles south of Soledad, […]
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Establish your setting early on. Give us The When, The Where, The Weather — the overall tone. Is your story happy, soft, somber? John Steinbeck does this so well in the beautiful opening of Of Mice and Men: A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and […]
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“Rat-eyed” Virginia Woolf described Somerset Maugham as. “No man ever put more of his heart and soul into the written word,” said Eudora Welty of William Faulkner. “Curiously dull, furiously commonplace, and often meaningless,” Alfred Kazin said of William Faulkner. “Hemingway never climbed out on a limb and never used a word where the reader […]
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(c)Ray Harvey 2011